Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Let the robots reason it out themselves kind of like how we do as humans. Of course the old "what could possibly go wrong" springs to mind, but since we humans define morality for ourselves, I don't see how that would be any different.

I suppose if I was being attacked by suicidal terrorist drones (terrorists) , I would consider it within the rules of war to discover where the drones are being operated from and to attack each and every terrorist/agent who was operating the drones and who was supplying the drones with their funds and attack and bomb them until they are stuck in the stone age. This seems to me that anyone who is a coward and uses disposable pawns (people no less) as chattel is inviting attacks onto themselves.

Yea, I know I changed the thought patterns here, but the same thing applies, whoever is operating the pawns in the battle and not actually fighting because they are cowardly hiding in a cave (or an office building in Washington DC as the case may be) is of course inviting attack as well. That is just the way war really functions. I don't see how a drone operator is any less killing people with machines than a person who is operating the stupid terrorists who are paid to end their lives to kill innocents. They are all guilty of killing in the end, its just the tool they are using you see...

The null hypothesis is that any changes witnessed are from natural processes that we do not understand on this planet. You might want to attribute every little change you see to this pet theory that man is destroying the world, but that is not science, science actually PROVES itself true through a process. And this process assumes the null is true until its proven false.

Climate change might be caused by man or it might be caused by natural processes that have been going on for 5 billion years. These processes happen over longer time periods than the paltry 100 years of data we have, so trying to come to any reasonable conclusion from just 100 or even 1000 years of data is an exercise in futility in my mind, and instead of assuming that humans are causing all witnessed changes, perhaps we should wait until climate models can predict the future until we jump to conclusions.

How do you know they balance out at all? The ice core data we have shows us that CO2 levels are typically much higher on this planet in our geologic past, so why would you assume that they balance out?

Except his logic differs from that of the IPCC which tells us that warming before 1950 was mostly natural. He assumes that this is not the case and that most of the warming since 1880 was caused by humans.

Natural variation is not noise. They are two different things, noise in climate data is typically the data which results from high temperature records for instance, or low temperature records. The noise typically cancels out over a long enough time period. Natural variation is simply the opposite of human caused warming for instance. Its the planet naturally heating up or cooling down through its own dynamic systems, from the oceans to the ocean cycles to weather systems to even ENSO and other part of our planet's heat distribution.

Having said that mouthful, I looked at the data. According to the IPCC, temperature changes before 1950 were not influenced much at all by greenhouse gases. But when you look at the temperature charts for the world, you see that the warming between roughly 1910-1940 is (about) the same as the warming that occurred between 1975-1998 which leads me to believe that natural variation could easily account for all of our witnessed warming. This is not to say it does, but it is a logical conclusion that it is indeed possible that all the warming that has happened has been natural.

But having said that, we do have an impact on this planet. The question is what is this impact, and since the data can not differentiate that, well the evidence can go either way and in the end as per the scientific method, we must assume that the impact is close to nil.

Models are only a success on their training data, they have failed at predicting the future at every step. Any idiot can get a model to match up to the training data. That is modeling 101 and is not proof that your model is correct or even "probably correct."

If that is your only evidence that you are correct, well than I don't know what to say.

AGW is real, because every human on this planet has an impact on our planet. The question as always is how large is that impact? And if you teach children BLINDLY that this impact is large with nothing but trained models to say so, well you aren't teaching them science but Gospel Truth. I did not state that humans have no impact.

How in the world will we head for an extinction level event? Have you even LOOKED at the data yourself? You do realize that this planet has seen CO2 levels 10 times what we have today (even 20 times higher) and not once did an extinction event play out due to CO2 increases. In fact, at one point in our past, the planet had roughly 2000 PPM CO2 (5 times today's levels) and we were in the midst of an ice-age.

You are expecting people to believe that you know what you are talking about and how catastrophe is going to happen when history tells us otherwise. If CO2 never caused this kind of disaster in our planet's past, how do you know it will today? And why do you believe this is so?

Solar and wind are NOT the future, but the past. You are forcing these choices onto everyone else because of weird beliefs on how CO2 will start TODAY to cause catastrophic warming when the history of our planet shows that it did not once do so. If you want to solve the CO2 crisis, embrace nuclear or go home. Wind and solar power are nothing but welfare for the rich and it will further destroy our nations lower and middle classes as they get even more poorer.

Want to know why that is? Because we all pay more for power, but those with resources are able to put up solar panels and wind turbines (the rich who pay income taxes...and the poor typically don't pay 8000 or more for the necessary taxes to benefit from this) and so in the end wind and solar is nothing but welfare for the rich. And good luck getting a poor person to benefit from a million dollar wind turbines, those truly are toys of the rich who than get free power thanks to the poor and the middle class who now pay more for power. Thanks rich people!

Oh, do most positive feedback loops contain stagnant data that does not change? Like 15 years without warming?

Yea, I did not think so. You sir have no idea what a positive feedback loop is. The heat keeps building up under that theory, and currently temperatures are stagnant like they have been for the last 15 years. Warming stopped. Scientists don't know why, and as one famous scientist says "its a travesty we can not explain it."

It might very well be "too late" to stop climate change, but that is not because of a positive feedback loop as you explain, but mainly because we can not control the climate and it will change with or without us perhaps in the future. Heck, we ARE going to go into another ice age at some point, and what the heck do we think we are going to do to stop that? Stand in the tracks of that train with our hand held up to stop it?

But natural causes is...and if you are not teaching children that the warming could very well be simply natural warming than you are not teaching them the scientific method which tells us that the null hypothesis is always assumed to be true until its proven false.

Science is about logic and not using logical fallacies to prove your case. Here, you use the old tired fallacy of Argumentum ad populum (appeal to widespread belief, bandwagon argument, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people) – where a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because many people believe it to be so.

In other words, yes we need better science education because you and the grandparent hardhead both failed to argue without a logical fallacy. Don't call people an idiot if you are being one. And don't assume that something is true just because you are on the band-wagon and think you know what you are talking about. We need better education for sure and this involves teaching children about logic as well as band-wagon popular science. Its too bad you learned from these new standards which pride itself on the band-wagon approach to science where the most popular theory is heralded as the correct theory and any other competing theories are dismissed out of hand.

Start voting the politicians out. They knew how to solve this problem decades ago, using nuclear power, and they failed to solve the problem. (80% reduction in emissions would have been a rather great start.) But the politicians like usual never solved the problem probably because the solution had no big money involved, and instead they promoted such nonsense as wind and solar power.

both political parties today are strongly in favor of wind and solar power, and its really no surprise when you think about it. Those solutions involve large-scale welfare for the rich and the well to do. While some in the middle class do enjoy tax breaks for solar power (that makes it profitable for them) everyone who pays zero in taxes gets squat, and gets screwed again especially the poor who are than forced to pay more for power when the costs of intermittant power hits the grid little by little.

So no, the solution was easy, the politicians and you as well screwed it up years ago by voting in R and D candidates who never even attempted to solve the problem and instead invested in yet more welfare for the rich. So no, I take offense therefore to your judgement of me and how I live. I find global warming funny to be honest and the scare stories even funnier still, because it SCREAMS that our political leaders are really the cause of this issue. We knew 30 years ago that CO2 might be a problem, and we wasted billion after billion on boondoggles on the rich, and other nonsense, and nothing came of it. CO2 emissions are even higher today, meaning that the hundreds of billions we have spent on this issue were a complete waste. So yea, you have no case to judge me. I didn't screw the pooch on this one, that was you and other idiots who voted in politicians who instead of solving a known problem squandered the money instead on welfare for the rich.

Having said that, I see that you have this impression that people should think its sad to be rich or to be well-to-do. Why is that? Why should someone feel guilt for being a rich person today? Rich of course means you can drive around for fun, and have the resources to keep your lights on over-night and run the power bill up......if you so choose. Instead of questioning how people live and how "wasteful" we are, why not focus on the true cause of our problem in this case and leave the rest of America alone in your sermon on how we are all evil if we are rich.